11/01/2011

A Law School Fantasy: Slashing Costs and Improving Preparedness

Dean Chemerinsky’s and Professor Jewel’s contributions both raise very important points about the challenges facing legal education reform. Personally, I'm in the camp of people who believe that the legal education model will change. However, it's apparent to me that changes must come predominately from outside of schools and the ABA Section of Legal Education. Survival instincts may prohibit even well-respected, well-meaning faculty scholars from adequately assessing the scope of the problems with the current law school model. But the increasing interest from U.S. Senators should signal to the uninitiated that law schools cannot continue to operate in a bubble. Nor can this discussion continue if everyone ignores the crux of the problem: intolerably high costs and an unacceptable number of unprepared graduates.

What would internal reform even look like if the two core goals are slashing tuition and improving preparedness? Part of the reason internal reform may be difficult to imagine, as Dean Chemerinsky pointed out, is because law schools are governed by faculty, and because substantial changes to the legal education model will alter "what [faculty] have to teach and do." That the Section of Legal Education is captured by similarly consumer-disoriented interests, despite overtures to the contrary, only aggravates the situation and observers. It bears repeating that the Standards Review Committee, Section of Legal Education, and Dean O'Brien in his posting do not once mention how important it is that the cost of obtaining a legal education drastically decline. Reducing costs cannot be the elephant in the room if this discussion is to carry any significance with the public.

Internal reform may also be difficult to imagine because increases in quality are typically tied at the hip to increases in costs. This attitude contributed to the current model and its explosive growth over at least the last 25 years. With little or no downward pressure on the cost of legal education, and a diversity of ideas about what it means to improve the student experience, law schools can introduce new features along with yearly tuition increases, knowing they will be rewarded for it in the U.S. News rankings.

On its face, the idea that costs can decrease while quality increases is fanciful. More to the point, there is substantial denial that there is a problem with the quality of education that law schools provide graduates. Such denial comes out in claims that the "law school crisis" is cyclical, not structural.

Like Dean Chemerinsky, I graduated (albeit this year) without being ready to practice law. Yet, not unlike many law school graduates, I still received a high quality education. This confirms Dean O'Brien's thoughts on the current state of legal education:

Legal education itself has never been in better shape in terms of the preparation that we provide future lawyers. In recent years, our schools have responded to suggestions by the bar and have substantially upgraded legal writing programs and practical skills opportunities. The process currently in place ensures that graduating lawyers are well trained for a variety of roles.

There are two important disconnects here. First, how can I claim that I received a high quality education and also say that people are wrong to deny there's a problem with the quality of education? Second, how can Professor Olivas claim that graduates are well trained for a variety of roles, despite the increasing reticence of clients to pay for junior associates? We can reconcile both sets of questions by examining how each claim uses a different metric to evaluate quality. The first claim in each set speaks to doing something well, but not necessarily producing graduates who are/feel ready to practice law.

This brings me back to the potential fantasy of reducing costs while improving quality. In our evolved-definition-of-quality world, we may find that the current pedagogy badly misses the mark. In this case, radical change may mean substantially changing the composition of legal educators, whose salaries and benefits make up a large chunk of law school operating costs. If faculty composition radically shifts to include more practitioners teaching as adjuncts in specific, practice-oriented classes, while tenured faculty must seek grants to continue their scholarly endeavors, we could see the costs of educating aspiring lawyers decline drastically.

Comments

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I believe you are quoting O'Brien, not Olivas.

Also, I am not quite sure what you are saying. You may have received a high quality education, but did that education prepare you for the legal marketplace of today and the future? Did it provide value commensurate with what you paid (or the taxpayers paid) for your education?

@mls, thank you for the correction. I've changed it. My apologies to both Dean O'Brien and Professor Olivas for mixing that up.

To answer your questions:

- I received a high quality education.
- It did not prepare me well enough to practice law. (With the caveat that I can only base this on how I feel now about my ability to represent somebody else's legal interests.)

Quality education is not, unfortunately, necessarily synonymous with attorney preparedness. We need to reassess how we define 'quality' and also who gets to define it.

That I would not be ready to practice law right away, and that I would need to take a bar prep course, are things I knew going in. But law school is the only option reasonably available to enter the legal profession. So I did it.

In my case, I am entering one of the federal hardship programs because I will not be able to service my debts next month. I am more capable for having gone to law school and may not repay all of my principal -- that will depend on what my next 10-25 years look like professionally. But if I repay very little relative to my total debt, given my opportunity costs to go to law school, I probably will come out on top.

But does the taxpayer?

When dealing with this question, I think it's important to move the discussion from the micro to the macro. It doesn't matter whether some individuals were a good investment for the government. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't. What matters is the aggregate cost to the taxpayer. Presently, the cost of obtaining a legal education is obscene. The consequences go beyond individual cost-benefit analyses. Ability to eventually pay doesn't justify educational costs at these levels.

If any law professors make it down to Kyle's comment, it is worth reading twice. Kyle represents of the sentiments of many many law graduates. He is reasonable. And he and his fellow students have become politically mobilized. And our fate rests with loans issued by the federal government. And the ABA has not played it hand well.

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About the Blog

Rising tuition. Misleading employment statistics. Inadequate skills training. Law schools have faced plenty of criticism for their role in the struggles of young lawyers today. The National Law Journal has assembled a panel of legal educators and law graduates to discuss whether law schools are facing a crisis, and how they should respond to their mounting problems.

Law School Review Contributors

Brian Tamanaha A professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law who writes about law schools on the blog Balkinization